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Maite Bernardelle: a life dedicated to transforming humanity

Writer's picture: Centro GajaCentro Gaja

Maite Bernardelle

With 50 years of experience spreading the Biodanza System around the world, the Argentinian teacher Maite Bernardelle has clearly responded to what she has inspired in her young life: contributing to the transformation of society in a profound way, eliminating everything that obstructs the full development of human potential.


Maite, one of the direct alumnas of the creator of Biodanza, the Chilean Rolando Toro, has dedicated himself for decades to training facilitators of the Biodanza system and is currently, for more than 15 years, director of the Spanish School and Center of Biodanza in Madrid , Spain. The creation of Professor Rolando Toro is a journey of personal development that brings the integration of the self and the full expression of human potential. It takes as its objective organic renewal, emotional re-education and renewed learning of the original functions of life, through a methodology that induces integrated experiences through music, singing, movement and group situations.


Let's talk with her to delve into the benefits of Biodanza in people's lives, understanding what they need to know more about the direct impact on their practitioners, which impels her to dedicate their life to it and how anyone who is exposed to this system can approach it. For the first time, you are faced with the burden of being present in various countries around the world and with thousands of people involved, for many years being little known.


How did you get started with Biodanza?


As a young man I was always curious, looking for something that I felt didn't correspond to what society showed us. I have always thought that the world should be more profound than it seems, and that the lives of people, including mine, should contain a greater element of passion, I find it, I find it in everyday life; something more powerful. This has always encouraged me to seek, with a very altruistic feeling. I oriented myself towards a profession of help, given that my natural aptitudes were very cooperative, with a strong propensity to protect what was therefore vulnerable, like children and elderly people.


I was very young and this led me to follow different paths shown by society: yoga, meditation and even reading Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Antonin Artaud; Buscaba the avant-garde, the transcultural. I was a bit of a revolutionary and protester, irritated by the improper way of life.


I explored many disciplines, but never stayed there for a long time in any one place. I also went through religions like Yoruba, rituals in Brazil, experiences with spiritualists and became a Reiki master, always searching for this concrete and conscious level, where this invisible part of life was.


This journey led me to specialize in techniques related to healing and contact. I realized that when I practiced disciplines that did not involve the physical, emotional and human aspects, I became colder. Then I began to be interested in the massages: Chinese, Thai, Hawaiian, which showed a little “spirit” in these techniques.


But as I am an admirer of the body, which is so noble, I was interested in everything, including sports massage and to see how high-performance people build their bodies in extraordinary ways.


Evidently I am fascinated by these potentialities that therefore exist in the human being, including in his body, when they are expressed. Sometimes I see football and my family knows why they say I hate football. But in reality I enjoy observing the dexterity of the movements, the cunning, the ability of the people, the muscular strength of the players. This great interest was directed every day to the body, without losing my admiration for the invisible world.


I experimented with many massage techniques, but I didn't find what I really wanted to do until I discovered Biodanza. It was incredible to me, even though I spent years working with massage and had created my own technique that was called “massage and movement”. When I discovered Biodanza I told myself that what I was doing was something particular, something living, that I didn't know how to name it to make me unfamiliar. This is why I am definitively referring to my Masaje Vivencial method: Human Integration Process.


This encounter with Rolando Toro's system was like a full explosion of golden hills that intertwined within each other, because he began to understand everything that was there in that moment. Everything found a meaning and an explanation. This happened at the beginning of Biodanza, in a fairly dark era in Argentina, when there was a lot of repression. Let's meet together in secret to talk about life.


It was there where you had one of my first experiences with Biodanza and that was fascinating. In the last few months Rolando flew to Argentina from Chile to give a conference. I have started practicing Biodanza with Luisa Zabarraín, in a community called Multiversità, frequented by many young people. Even though you were a mother, "I escaped" from home to "arrange the world", as we say. We are there to weigh this toque and on occasions we are reunited by running and I am able to do so.


Rolando's conference focused on psychiatry and his relationship with the movement and touched on his reflections on aspects of the expansion of consciousness. During the meeting I offered a practical experience and discussed what was my passion: the tension rings of Wilhelm Reich. He was very passionate about the respect, explaining how unresolved emotions create conflicts and how these, if they come together and integrate, dejaban hues in the physical body. Everything, in this moment, was felt by me: it was like a breakdown in which maternal love, duty, altruism, the desire for social change and the understanding of what caused the repression of sexuality were intertwined. Biodanza transformed my life always into a reticular feeling.


God give me a new perspective to look at life. I was forced to see it as Rolando presented it, in a completely systemic way, understanding how what happens in a part of the planet affects us all. It was a love story with this wonderful man, of exaggerated, rapid movements, pure adrenaline, agile, creative, a man of fire. I also say that his creativity and his abilities to actuate and change were so intense that he consumed him like a fire, in a moment when he wore a black belt in marching arts.


As you saw it, so good and with tears in your eyes for the pain of humanity, you could also be a tiger, a ferocious animal when something inflamed it. From the first moment he began to follow him, wondering whether he could surpass what he had done, because he had finally understood many things by working with abandoned children through the Vital Massage with games, theater, music and stories.


Rolando accompanied me to the "juvenile world", more familiar today but I was born in this moment. I was so fascinated with what I said, that I told myself that what happened was Biodanza. This recognition gave me a great boost. Then I started to learn with him: he came, he supervised my work and oriented me, until after two years I started to share what I knew with other people.


In Argentina he began to organize reunions for Rolando in different institutions. During one of these events, we switched people to complete the program and decided: "I have an intervention". It was pure naivety. It has 150 people. When I met so many people in front of me, I suddenly lost my voice. With microphone in hand he began to talk about emotional tensions and how they reflected in our body and our behavior. Little by little I calmed down, I recovered my voice and the audience was happy, they applauded me. My husband and my little children are there. It was an incredible moment.


My family has always supported me and, if not by them, I have not been linked to where I am now.


What does Biodanza have to do with the depth of life you are looking for?


I believe it has a transgressing look, which breaks with the social structures we are used to. When Rolando opened up this knowledge of possibilities to me, I realized that he was a man who wanted a social transformation, and I realized that I also had this seed inside me. It was like doing politics, but through contact. My internal position was to face life with an emphasis that we could define as political, but without doing what is commonly understood as politics. For me it was a form of existence, because I felt represented by the function of society in no sense, neither in its models of life nor in its institutional structures.




When Rolando talked about education and explained why it was bad, why the children were taught less to live; or health, affirming that the symptoms are treated but the causes are not treated; or human relationships, when I said that people live locked in armor and never express what they really feel from behind the heart, I felt that they were giving voice to what I felt myself. It was an epiphany.


He wrote her a poem that said: "In your fierce flight of the eagle, the rock on your wings has touched my heart forever."

When Rolando Toro hatched, he was a gentle and firm man, with the perception of an eagle who wanted and looked with a panoramic vision, but who also acted, with a natural aggressiveness that he didn't hesitate to show. It was love at first sight of life, an instant in which it lives in its entirety. Because of this I became passionate about Biodanza, because I discovered that what I thought was only mine, in reality pertained to humanity: the desire to transform, to change, to be rebellious in the depths of my heart, always seeking the truth, the truth of the ser. , the truth of an enlightened heart. I felt deeply identified; It was a fundamental moment for me.


What is the history of Escuela Hispana?


I have always traveled with many thanks to Biodanza. First as a participant, then as a facilitator. I have a lot of heart to be invited to many countries. Find out what was innovative and merged what you wanted with the Biodanza matrix, integrating my work on massage. It was an outcome because the term “masaje” was introduced, which was frowned upon at that time. I explained to Rolando that the massage could also be like a load, sometimes on the skin, sometimes on the muscles or the joints, but always with the idea of ​​developing human potential, connection, humanity with others. With careful attention he built many things, until one day he arrived in Milan, where Biodanza was extended to Italy.


There he met Tiziana B., a facilitator who kept a house in Cerdena. She invited me to give a lesson and proposed a Biodanza class in massages, which would constitute an extension of Biodanza. The group was fascinated and began to invite me regularly. He discovered that the Sardinian people had a deep connection with their roots and a strong cultural identity. I asked them to open a school and accepted them with enthusiasm. He worked with Rolando and, 30 years ago, he founded the Escuela Biodanza de Cerdeña.


After a few cycles, traveling continuously became increasingly demanding, as she trained Angelica Scotti and Nicoletta Quadu as teachers, and they took charge of the direction of the school. Later, Rolando gave me the responsibility of founding another school in Rome, but it was never forgotten.


Shortly after the year 2000, Rolando proposed to open a school in Spain to preserve Rolando Toro's original method. We welcomed him in Madrid, since I was here, I lived in England, I had moved there. We began with a few lessons prior to training and, supported by our own Rolando, we created the Center for Hispanic Studies which has consolidated itself as a space to preserve the original method.


The Spanish School began with a small group of 20 people, of which 14 continued their training. Many of them are still wrapped up in school. The College and the Hispanic Center have organized visits by Rolando Toro and numerous Biodanza events in Spain. Today we meet in the twelfth cycle of facilitator training, with an excellent teaching team and a direction shared with professor Fernando Tucho.


What are the distinctive factors of Biodanza that the Spanish School offers in the Biodanza panorama?


I believe that the fundamental matrix of all this, which is the matrix of Rolando Toro, is a system that was born not only to offer well-being to people, but also as a much more ambitious movement and that some of his original disciples could understand this dimension. and raise it carefully.


What Rolando was looking for was a social transformation, not just individual well-being. It wasn't about making people last better or making them a little more communicative, but rather transforming the depths of their life, changing their style of life with respect to what culture proposes, with its imperatives of death, stereotypical alterations and models that do not respect the essence of the human being. To connect with the original function of life, it is necessary to rely on the biocentric principle, which allows us to reach a high level of expanded perception, ethical consciousness and altruism in all aspects of existence: in eroticism as a connection with everything that it is . alive, in vitality, affection and existential creativity.


Therefore, all Biodanza exercises respond to these principles. Each exercise is based on authenticity, not on acting "as you...". In reality, true emotions and true feelings should move during the exercise; It is not a theatrical or aesthetic movement, but it must be real, without choreography or foreign patrons. The objective is that all social masks should be combined to harmonize more with what one really is: authenticity, connection with animality and vital instincts, in harmony with one's surroundings.


Therefore, let's get to the point of radicalizing Biodanza, to create a more profound language and allow the person to radically transform their life. It's not just about learning a technique to use it at a professional level, but rather offering something of a truly genuine form. As in the case of chamanism: the chaman only leads one to follow it after having followed numerous authentic paths to work on this same path.


What we offer is to draw something from inside out, accompanying the other on a profound anthropological level.


A discipline created for 60 years, why is it relevant and what does it tell humanity today?


This is a frequent question, because many times we find ourselves more in line at the same time than in any other thing. Rolando returns to the eternal: the anthropological vision of Biodanza is oriented towards the eternal man, because we work with the universal humans, with the best and most essential in the human being: on the capacity for fusion with others, of love, of connection, of Disinterested action, de expansion of consciousness. These elements do not belong to a culture nor to a specific era, as long as they are tied to what the human being has always had the ability to develop, his most profound mechanisms of action.


Therefore, all the dances, exercises and music of Biodanza form a movement full of meaning. It is something timeless, not tied to the distinction between the past, present and future. All the dissociations that limit the greatness of the human being must be resolved in society so that the internal divinity of each one emerges and can encounter the other's. This timelessness is what makes Biodanza infinite.


Why is it important to give the training in Biodanza?


The weekly group represents an essential work for one person. This is the first step, without which it is impossible to understand the meaning of Biodanza. It is essential to undertake this path to dissolve the dissociations we experience, initiate a change in life style and abandon the pathological attitude that society inculcates in us from children. The habitual practice of Biodanza helps us little by little to understand what we feel, to recognize it and defend it, to move away from the permanent juicio of culture, to free ourselves from the feeling of guilt. It is fundamental to harmonize and integrate the individual, unlocking latent abilities such as communication, body grace, self-regulation, good sleep, healthy nutrition and more.


However, in the second year, this process must be radicalized, reaching so deeply into your life that it transforms each of your movements on the planet. It's not about taking a forward step and then moving backwards: no further steps along the way allow for integration. Each response will be more profound and, spontaneously, this will lead you to deviate from the vision of my love for others. You will feel the desire to convey happiness, transformation, the greater capacity to love and the existential decision to defend life, to share it with others.


Therefore, Rolando Toro proposes that, in the third year, people participate in more intense study groups compared to regulars, seminars, schools, conferences and that they enter a phase of greater internal ebullience, so that three years of Biodanza can you are enough to log it. this process. Starting from this moment, some will leave Biodanza integrating it into their cells and living peacefully without being forced to continue learning, because they have learned. Others, in return, will say: I want to bring this to society because it has transformed me and I want to offer it to others.


How does Maite Bernardelle feel when she brings new people to the school?


It's always a disappointment, the greatest desire and also the greatest misery. When I connect with someone I try to get to know them, but I also want to invade them, give them desire and love them. For me it's like opening a love card, as we do when we are young: we tear apart the paper, we read the words written by hand. A new student is like this for me, a new possibility of motherhood, in the path of birth and rebirth.


I love the people I connect with, because they have a real phase of creation: a Biodanza facilitator is always -symbolically- in a process of motherhood and fatherhood, but without overprotection. It is accompanied in the first steps, so that the participants begin to live in contact with its own essence and are capable of transmitting it to others, generating profound evolutionary processes.


Therefore we can decide that Biodanza is a proposal for real renaissance.




Article published in Pressenza (https://www.pressenza.com/es/)


Por: Luis Daniel Botero Arango

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